1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic commerce and, more particularly, to Web-based shopping collaborations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web-based shopping is primarily a solitary experience involving little to no interactions among online shoppers. That is, no online analog exists for a typical real world experience where two or more individuals often collaborate on purchases. The collaboration often involves pleasurable social interactions, impulse purchases, mutual compromise, a synthesis of ideas regarding a purchase, and other such benefits. The lack of collaboration associated with Web-based shopping results in a less robust shopping experience for many and, thereby, reduces the market effectiveness of Web-based shopping.
Known attempts to enhance an online experience using conventional collaboration technologies suffer from significant drawbacks. A simple solution is for several shoppers to individually conduct Web-based shopping sessions and to communicate the results of these sessions to the other shoppers via phone, email, chatting, instant messaging, or any other communication means. The complexity of these manually maintained communication sessions geometrically increases as the number of collaborating shoppers increases. Additionally, this manual collaboration process is extremely slow, cumbersome, and often frustrating. For instance, shoppers attempting to communicate session results with other shoppers often fail to provide sufficient details to permit a result to be located or inadvertently specify a different item than they intended. Further, the process of searching for each referenced item, even when specified in sufficient detail, can be arduous. Finally, online shopping Web sites often dynamically change, causing items to be sold out, re-priced, and related, all of which can be problematic.
Another way to collaborate is to establish a co-browsing session where several session participants share a desktop, so that each participant can commonly experience a single online shopping session. This results in all items being placed within a single shopping basket. It also requires all participants to view the same session at the same time. This can be very annoying to shoppers, who will often be forced to focus upon items in which they have little interest or forced to rush in examining items of interest in consideration of others. This approach poorly mirrors a real world shopping scenario, where shoppers can independently shop and intermittently gather in a common location to collaborate upon purchases.